Electronic mail (abbreviated to e-mail) services have become increasingly popular in recent years (for either personal or business applications). These services allow exchanging electronic messages (referred to as e-mail messages, or simply e-mails) between users of computers over a communication network. Some (private) e-mail services are used to exchange information within a specific organization, such as a company; however, the e-mail services have become very popular especially thanks to the Internet, which makes it possible to communicate anywhere in the world. The e-mails allow conveying information in a direct and immediate way; this provides a communication channel that is fast, flexible and reliable.
However, the widespread use of the e-mails has brought about some problems. Indeed, the very low cost of sending e-mails (being substantially free of charge when a corresponding connection to the Internet is already established) facilitates their proliferation; as a result, a huge number of e-mails is sent every day by most users.
Moreover, the simplicity of the operations required to manage the e-mails makes their execution faster and faster; this is particularly true for expert users, which tend to perform those operations almost mechanically.
However, all of the above reduces a level of attention that is paid to the management of the e-mails. As a result, errors routinely occur when e-mails are composed, sent, received or stored.
Particularly, a typical problem arises when an e-mail is sent by a sender user (or simply sender) to a list of receiver users (or simply receivers). Indeed, in this case one or more of the desired receivers may be missing in the e-mail. Typically, this happens when the sender forgets inserting them into the e-mail; the same problem is experienced when their addresses are misprinted.
Once the sender becomes aware of the error (for example, because s/he notices the missing receivers in the e-mail that was sent or because s/he receives a failure message for the receivers with the misprinted addresses), two options are available to solve the problem.
A first possibility is of forwarding the same e-mail to the missing receivers. However, in this case the (original) receivers of the e-mail do not have any indication of the missing receivers. Therefore, the error is propagated when the original receivers reply to the (original) e-mail automatically, by means of a function commonly available to respond to all the users indicated in an e-mail; indeed, the (reply) e-mail is now sent only to the sender and to the other original receivers (but not to the missing receivers).
An alternative possibility is of sending a new e-mail (with the same information) to all the receivers (i.e., the original ones and the missing ones). Conversely, in this case the original receivers are provided with the same e-mail twice, so that they have to replace the wrong one with the correct one. However, this is quite annoying for the original receivers. Moreover, very often the original receivers discard the new e-mail (since it is faster than storing it again in place of the original one); therefore, the same problems pointed out above are now experienced by these original receivers.
In both cases, this may cause the loss of valuable information for users that were instead intended to receive it. The problem is particular acute in business applications—for example, when the e-mails relate to information requests, task assignments, and the like.